Paolo Marzolo and Cesare Lombroso: a semiotic-medical inheritance between word, sounds, and face

2.1 A common starting point: Lucretius

One could say, without exaggerating, that Paolo Marzolo (1811–1868) was the disciplinary father of Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), linked to him by a profound mutual esteem and friendship. As the dedication of his first important work, L’uomo bianco e l’uomo di colore (Lombroso 1871) proves, the filiation of the Veronese scholar to the Paduan master is compared to that of Lucretius from Epicurus, as evidenced by the passage from the De rerum natura quoted immediately after the dedication to Marzolo:

Te sequor, […] inque tuis nunc

ficta pedum pono pressis vestigia signis […]

nam simul ac ratio tua coepit vociferari

naturam rerum, divina [haud] mente co[h]orta[m],

diffugiunt animi terrores […].

[You, […] I follow, and in your footsteps I now tread boldly […]

As soon as your philosophy begins to proclaim the true nature of things revealed by your divine mind, the terrors of the mind are dispelled]. (book III, 3–4, 14–16; see also Deufert 2019: 94, transl. by Smith 2001: 67–68)^[1]

Indeed, Lombroso also used the same exergue to his work as that in the M. storici, that is, Dum veteres avias tibi de pulmone revello by Aulus Persius Flaccus (‘as I eradicate from your soul the ancient prejudices of your ancestors,’ Satire V, 92, transl. mine), demonstrating his strong interest in the Marzolian study of soma. However, his debt was not only academic, but also private, especially from the point of view of training for his area of choice of medical studies – gratitude chiefly evident in the name he gave to his first daughter, Paola Marzola (see also Villa 1985: 14 and Frigessi 2003: 43). In the preface intended for the reader (dated 1868, the same year of Marzolo’s death), Lombroso explained in more detail the deep reasons that led him to write his work, a sort of monument dedicated to Marzolo and his thought:

In tanta dubiezza, un triste, un assai triste caso mi vinse. Il primo fra gli antropologi italiani, il mio Marzolo, moriva, senza aver potuto compiere e difondere la sua grand’opera, a cui egli era più legato che non alla vita. A me parve allora, che il volgarizzare alcune idee da lui predilette, fosse un conforto al dolore di quella perdita, un’espiazione all’ingiusta dimenticanza. Non potendogli erigere colle mie povere forze un degno monumento, volli almeno spargere, sulla solitaria fossa di quel gigante fra i pensatori italiani, alcune povere frondi di una pianta ch’egli crebbe robusta, e fu la gioja e la gloria della sua vita. [In so much doubt, a sad, a very sad case won me. The first of the Italian anthropologists, my Marzolo, died, without having been able to complete and spread his great work, to which he was more attached than to his life. It seemed to me then, that popularizing some of his favorite ideas was a comfort to the pain of that loss, an expiation for unjust forgetfulness. Not being able to erect a worthy monument to him with my poor strength, I wanted at least to scatter, on the solitary pit of that giant among Italian thinkers, some poor fronds of a plant that he grew robust, and was the joy and glory of his life]. (Lombroso 1871: 7–8, transl. mine)

2.2 Between facts and anecdotes

As far as Marzolo is concerned, the few biographical notes about him can be found almost exclusively in the hagiographic (hence not fully reliable) biography of his pupil Matteo Ceccarel (1870),^[2] who took into account some memories and obituaries from friends and colleagues, and reported the meeting between Lombroso and Marzolo in 1851, after the publication, in the journal Il Collettore dell’Adige, of a review entitled Filologia, written by the former on the first volume of M. storici (Lombroso 1851). However, the anecdote, recalled later by Gina Lombroso (1921 [1915]) in her father’s biography, is of uncertain veracity and probably not accurate (see also Villa 1985: 91 n. 12 and Frigessi 2003: 43). This is what Ceccarel recounted:

Un giorno lesse alla fine un articolo in un giornale di Verona, nel quale si discorreva degnamente del suo libro; onde desiderò vivamente di conoscerne l’autore, il cui nome eragli sconosciuto. Fu questa la prima cara emozione ch’egli provò: fu il primo compenso a tanti anni di studi ingrati, di veglie penose e di meditazioni indefesse. Paolo Marzolo pensava che l’autore dell’articolo fosse un uomo già provetto nella scienza, un pensatore solitario e vissuto nella oscurità per condizioni fortuite o per tristizia di uomini e di tempi. L’autore dell’articolo, non guari dopo, lo visitò a Treviso. Era un giovinetto di sedici anni – era Cesare Lombroso colui che, primo, in Italia aveva intravveduto il genio di Paolo Marzolo: ed egli si presentava a lui coll’affetto di un figlio e colla riverenza di un discepolo. [One day he finally read an article in a Verona newspaper, in which his book was discussed worthily; hence he very much wanted to know the author, whose name was unknown to him. This was the first dear emotion he felt: it was the first reward for so many years of ungrateful studies, painful vigils and tireless meditations. Paolo Marzolo thought that the author of the article was a man already skilled in science, a solitary thinker who lived in darkness due to fortuitous conditions or the sadness of men and times. Not long afterward, the author of the article visited him in Treviso. He was a young man of sixteen – he was Cesare Lombroso, the one who, in Italy, had first glimpsed the genius of Paolo Marzolo; and he presented himself to him with the affection of a son and with the reverence of a disciple]. (Ceccarel 1870: 228–229, transl. mine)^[3]

Born in Padua, Paolo Marzolo introduced himself to ancient and modern languages and philosophy at an early age; he graduated in medicine in 1834 with a dissertation on the vices of language (De vitiis loquelae) and began to work as a physician (i.e., medico condotto) in the Veneto area, even during the Risorgimento period and the cholera epidemic (1854–1855). In the meantime, he spent several years traveling around Italy for research stays in libraries, and became a corresponding member of various universities (e.g., Treviso) and of the Veneto Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts, where he read four memoirs from 1850 to 1860, subsequently published in the acts of the same Institute.

Physician, philosopher-linguist, and also author of two poems, already considered by his contemporaries an anachronistic and bizarre thinker, Marzolo’s scientific fame and destiny was marked by the judgment of the well-known Friulian linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, who in a footnote of his second volume of Studj critici wrote:

Un tentativo di glottologia universale ha l’Italia ne’ Monumenti storici rivelati dall’analisi della parola, di Paolo Marzolo, opera condotta con mezzi inadeguati, ma con oltrepotenza d’ingegno. Il Marzolo era di certo anche per me un vero eterodosso; ma un eterodosso geniale, poderoso, michelangiolesco, dinanzi al quale dovevamo tutti inchinarci. [Paolo Marzolo’s Monumenti storici rivelati dall’analisi della parola is the Italian attempt at a universal glottology, a work carried out with inadequate means, but with overpowering ingenuity. Even to me, Marzolo was certainly a real heterodox; but a brilliant, powerful, Michelangelesque heterodox, before whom we all had to bow]. (Ascoli 1877: 42 n. 8, transl. mine, my italics)^[4]

As shown in the letter to the editor, Alberto Cavalletto, included in the second volume of the work (Marzolo 1859: 3–4), the forty-year monumental project started in 1828 and remained unfinished, due to its titanic structure and the lack of financial resources to support its publication. However, the last and unique complete work, Essay on signs, together with several other short writings published in journals of the time constitute the sketches of the topics that it should have dealt with, swinging from linguistics, to philosophy, history, and medicine, up to anthropology, ethnology, and geography. Indeed, Marzolo’s worship for a historical and polidisciplinary Vichian Scienza nuova also emerges from his close friendship with Carlo Cattaneo and the collaboration with Il Politecnico, where Marzolo published the three lecture notes of the university courses he held in Milan, Naples, and Pisa from 1860 to 1865.^[5]

After the publication of the aforementioned M. storici’s review in 1851, from 1853 to 1866 Marzolo and Lombroso had friendly correspondence on their mutual issues and publications, as well as on personal and family events. The figure of Marzolo occupied a central place in Lombroso’s correspondence with his close friends, such as Paolo Mantegazza and Jakob Moleschott, and deeply impacted, both scientifically and personally, on the so-called Lombrosian school, carried on by his daughters, the eldest, Paola Marzola, anthropologist, journalist, writer, and pedagogist, and the second-eldest, Gina Elena Zefora, writer, physician, and Lombroso’s biographer, respectively the wives of Lombroso’s pupils, the physician and anthropologist Mario Carrara and the sociologist Guglielmo Ferrero, who dedicated his work I simboli in rapporto alla storia e filosofia del diritto, alla psicologia e alla sociologia to Marzolo (Ferrero 1893; see also Lauretano 1995). Moreover, Guglielmo Ferrero was co-author, with Lombroso himself, of the masterpiece La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale (Lombroso and Ferrero 1893; see also Gibson and Rafter 2004). What is more, Lombroso’s other son Ugo, a physiologist and survivor of the Italian racial deportations after 1943, also followed the scientific and divulgative path of his father and master.^[6]

Born to a Jewish family in Verona and far better known than his Pygmalion, Cesare Lombroso was encouraged by Marzolo to undertake medical studies, which he completed between Pavia, Padua, and Vienna, graduating in 1858 with a dissertation on cretinism in Lombardy (Ricerche sul cretinismo in Lombardia) published in 1859. After enlisting as a volunteer military doctor in the Piedmontese army in the Second War of Independence (1859) and holding various teaching positions in psychiatry and anthropology, he first obtained the chair of forensic medicine in Turin in 1876 and finally, in 1905, the ad personam chair of the newborn criminal anthropology discipline.

From 1864, while still in Pavia, he began the study of the insane (i.e., pazzi, alienati), later founding several case analysis laboratories (cabinets), as well as, in 1880, the journal Archivio di psichiatria, scienze penali e antropologia criminale. At the same time, Lombroso’s main interests concerned the evolution of diseases influenced by geographic and climatic factors (e.g., pellagra, widespread in northern Italy), implementing a convergence between anthropology, psychiatry, and forensic medicine for a psychophysical study of man in relation to the surrounding environment and society, focusing also on medical geography. He mainly used a nosological and craniometric approach, as shown, above all, in his masterpiece L’uomo delinquente in rapporto all’antropologia, alla giurisprudenza ed alle discipline carcerarie, published in five editions (1876, 1878, 1884, 1889, and 1896–1897), the last of which in four volumes, including a physiognomic cartographic atlas (Lombroso 1896–1897).^[7]

2.3 A shared framework

Lombrosian and Marzolian interdisciplinarity is the fruit of several roots, and involves manifold contexts.

Firstly, the medical-scientific interest of both can be traced back, even before the positivist milieu, to their Paduan medical-biological background. Mainly referring to Galenic anatomy and the Aristotelian works Historia animalium and De anima, in the sixteenth century it was based on the tradition of anatomical dissection beginning with Andreas Vesalius (see Leone 2022: 7) and then anchored in the seventeenth century to the figure of the anatomist Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente, a pupil of Gabriele Falloppio, then founder of the anatomical theater in Padua and author of De locutione et eius instrumentis (Fabricius 1601); two centuries later, the Paduan context centers on the figure of the Paduan linguist and philosopher Melchiorre Cesarotti, author of the Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue in 1801 (see Gensini and Tardella 2016; Orrù 2018).^[8]

Secondly, the Enlightenment-positivist furrow involves an organicistic and monogenetic conception of language (e.g., Charles De Brosses), an empiricist, sensist, and ideologist approach (e.g., John Locke, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Antoine Destutt De Tracy, Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis), and a systematically scientific gaze à la Comte (see also Savoia 2008). As such, both linguistic comparativism (e.g., the Schlegel brothers in Germany, Bernardino Biondelli, and Graziadio Isaia Ascoli in Italy) and anthropological comparativism (e.g., Giustiniano Nicolucci and Paolo Mantegazza), result in this interdisciplinary sentiment, as well as in the disciplinarization and the systematization of the several branches of knowledge. In a nutshell, paraphrasing and summarizing Marzolo’s thought, from Aristotle to Darwin there is only one pivot, science, aiming to knock out beliefs that were not objectively grounded, and following a path from the known to the unknown (and never vice versa), in search of the causes of things and events.

On this axis, a discipline such as physiognomy – dealing with the study of emotions and their expression in humans and animals, as well as of facial expressions and articulation of sounds, up to anthropometric studies, psychiatry, etc. – implies, as Umberto Eco (1985: 45) noted, the transition from natural dispositions to science, that is, from subjective characterization to the claim of objectivity.

3.1 As the sounds, so the gestures: a natural history and physiology of languages

The four published volumes (1847, 1859, 1863, 1866) of the M. storici focus on the origin of languages, on their progress and development, and on their changes. What is worth noticing is that language is conceived not only systematically, but also organically, as a body in continuous evolution, in the wake of eighteenth-century Enlightenment and nineteenth-century comparative tradition.

In the introduction, Marzolo defines his approach as “fisiologia delle lingue [physiology of languages],” supporting a scientific-positivistic point of view, and aiming “fa[r] passare la linguistica al rango di scienza naturale [at raising linguistics to the rank of natural science]” (Marzolo 1847: 21–22, transl. mine). According to the Paduan physician-linguist, this encyclopedic and mosaic-based investigation should begin from the identification of the laws of language development, resting on their original core, which can be identified through etymology and in the reconstruction of the genealogical trees of words, showing the main transformations that occurred but also opening up to future ones.

Following the Aristotelian–Fabrician medical-biological method, Marzolo presents an anatomical examination of the human phono-articulatory apparatus with its various parts cooperating in the articulation of sounds, as well as its defects, which lead to its imperfections. He also analyzes the production mechanism of the articulated sounds according to various intrinsic (e.g., sex, age, temperament, habit) and extrinsic conditions (e.g., climate, soil, social role), and therefore identifies three primary and original elements of language: (1) the automatic or mechanic element, which deals with the mere structure of the articulatory organ and the involuntary or voluntary production of inarticulate and articulated sounds; (2) the pathetic or interjective element, which implies the key role of sensitivity and perception, and constitutes the spontaneous effect resulting from the sensory impression due to an external action; (3) the imitative or onomatopoeic element, relating to the assignment of a meaning to a sound through the associative memory of a sensation, a process defined as ideological-phonetic (see Dovetto 2018; Orrù 2018) (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1:

Fabrici’s organum locutionis (Fabricius 1601, image in the public domain).

Figure 2:

Marzolo’s phono-articulatory apparatus (Marzolo 1847, image in the public domain, modified by the author).

According to Marzolo, linguistic change, due to the laziness of the speakers, originates both from the habit of performing certain articulatory gestures and from peculiar individual dispositions (Dovetto 2018: 105). Not only sounds, but also gestures, such as body and facial movements, have a tripartite origin:

I gesti nel più lato senso, cioè comprendendo sotto tale denominazione ogni moto del corpo, quindi anche l’atteggiamento fisionomico, si distinguono in tre origini, che corrispondono ai tre elementi automatico, patetico ed imitativo. [Gestures in the broadest sense, that is, encompassing under that designation every motion of the body, thus including physiognomic stance, are distinguished in three origins, which correspond to the three elements automatic, pathetic, and imitative]. (Marzolo 1847: 75, transl. mine, my italics)

As a result, two interconnected phono-visual nexuses appear. Firstly, that of race–language, where the rigidity and flexibility (i.e., pronunciation) of the phono-articulatory apparatus mainly depend on the social and geographical conditions of the populations speaking a given language, with a key role of the habit. Greater geographical isolation (e.g., of wild populations) corresponds to greater rigidity in pronunciation and an increasing number of languages spoken, caused by a lack of (linguistic, cultural, etc.) exchange: for example, the primitive, uncivilized, and uneducated condition is reflected in the reduplication of syllables typical of wild populations, akin to the infant stage (Marzolo 1847: 83–85; see also 1847: 18–19). Secondly, that of language–climate, where the activity or inertia of the articulation of sounds rests upon the influence of both the climate (in the wake of De Brosses) and the soil, as well as of the geographical position and even of the social role (Marzolo 1847: 36–39).

In the path of the progress from non-civilization to civilization, a greater development of languages corresponds to a lesser use of gestures.^[9] Onomatopoeia and facial movements coexist at the origin and during the development of language: however, if at a primitive stage (e.g., in savages) the former, consisting mainly of automatic and pathetic elements, is ancillary to mimicry, with progress toward the civilized condition, the situation is reversed. Hence, gestures constitute a spontaneous and uneducated element, while verbal languages and the presence of the imitative element in words through onomatopoeia are indicators of civilization and education – even in the civilized stage, however, gestures turn out to be present, albeit to a lesser extent (Marzolo 1847: 75). Like imitation and repetition, onomatopoeia contributes to the creation of a “fisonomia della lingua [physiognomy of language]” (Marzolo 1847: 350, transl. mine) through recollection, assimilation, and allusion (namely, reminiscence) to words of earlier origin. These close and intersecting relationships constitute the seeds of the germination of Lombrosian facial semiotics, although the Marzolian theory does not actually present a linguistic–racial taxonomy (see Dovetto 2018: 103–104).

3.2 Marzolo’s semiotic ideology: a linguistic approach to physiognomy

According to Marzolo, all sounds, regardless of their origin, are emitted contingently arising from sensations. Furthermore, pathetic sounds imply a role of the body not only in the vocal articulation through the phono-articulatory apparatus, but also through facial expressions and gestures. Interjection is rooted in humans (and in animals) because of their nature as sentient beings – indeed:

La forza, la rapidità, il tono accompagnati da speciali attitudini del volto servono ad espressioni caratteristiche, e determinano nell’uditore organizzato in simile maniera moti reattivi consensuali […] perciò e la fisonomia degli astanti e talora la voce corrispondono a quello che parla. [Strength, speed, and tone, accompanied by special facial aptitudes, are used for characteristic expressions and determine consensual reactive motions in the listener – given that the listener and the speaker are similarly organized [ …] therefore both the physiognomy of the bystanders and sometimes the voice correspond to the one who is speaking]. (Marzolo 1847: 57, transl. mine, my italics)

Consequently, in Marzolo’s scientific program, the study of language and its origin must also include the extensive study of physiognomy, conceived as a theory of the expression of emotions, in a proto-Darwinian sense. Indeed, twenty-five years later and after Marzolo’s death, in his The expression of the emotions in man and animals (1872), Darwin considers physiognomy as the starting point of the study of emotions and their externalization, defining it as “the recognition of character through the study of the permanent form of the features” (Darwin 1872: 1) – primarily, the facial and body characters, as well as gestures and inarticulate sounds, produced unintentionally, and then the articulated voice used for communicative purposes (1872: 60), both affected by emotions, i.e., states of mind, and physical and bodily sensations (1872: 27).

As far as Marzolo is concerned, according to an Enlightenment-eighteenth-century linguistic approach, the vehicle of emotions and sensations are above all primitive sounds, which are to be understood as ways or occasions for the emission of articulated sounds in the first linguistic age, as well as three degrees or phases of development that over time come to coexist, despite their origin, due to the various modifications occurred. As the weakening of impressions in the progress of civilization implies a consequent loss of the pathetic element in favor of onomatopoeia, Marzolo (1847: 57) gives imitation a central role as an instinct rooted in human nature – therefore “ogni lingua, appresa e non creata per primo consorzio di enti umani, è onomatopeia, cioè imitazione del sistema vocale di date nazioni [every language, learned and not created by the initial association of human entities, is onomatopoeia, that is, imitation of the vocal system of given nations]” (1847: 73, transl. mine).

As expounded in the fourth volume of the M. storici and in the S. sui segni, both published in 1866 and thematically related to the two memoirs of 1850 and 1856, the core of Marzolo’s semiotic thought is mostly constituted by the close relationship between word, sentiment, and thought, hinged on perceived sensations and their recollection. Sanctifying that “l’azione delle parole sull’uomo è prima di tutto acustica [the action of words on human beings is first of all acoustic],” Marzolo distinguishes between “due maniere d’intelligenza reciproca tra gli uomini col mezzo fonetico [two manners of mutual intelligence among humans with the phonetic medium]” (Marzolo 1850: 43 and 1856: 25, transl. mine): (a) a general and subjective intelligence called sympathetic or expressive, namely, sentiment, concerning the perception of sensations; and (b) a relative, specific, and objective intelligence called ideological or significative, namely, thought, implying the mnemonic ability to remember already perceived sensations (Marzolo 1866a: 5).

Indeed, Marzolo states that “la prima condizione ideologica delle parole [è] cioè di destare una reminiscenza [the first ideological condition of words is thus to arouse reminiscence]” (Marzolo 1850: 44 and 1856: 25, transl. mine, italics in the original text), that is, the faculty that allows humans to carry out the experiential, cognitive, and recollective pathway of past sensations, associating newly experienced (acoustic) sensory impressions with others previously undergone through the so-called process of allusion. Basically, it corresponds to the associative semiotic chain between words and meanings related to previous sensations, which leads to semantic extension and the acquisition of new meanings (Marzolo 1850: 45–50 and 1856: 25–26; see also Marzolo 1847: 121–122, 163, 193–194). This is certainly linked to education and to the learning process, that is, to the teaching of signs, which, however, is often based on the signs themselves and not on things and their perception and experience. Thus, the abuse of signs, with the complicity of their intrinsic imperfections, leads to those fallacies, which soon become mere pathologies (Marzolo 1866b: 48–70; see Lauretano 2003: 75–76, Savoia 2008: 522–523, and also Villa 1985: 99).

Mutatis mutandis, using Barthesian terms, we might go so far as to consider Marzolo’s associative semiotic approach as mythological (see Barthes 1972: ch. 2). After all, the Paduan thinker would have no problem defining the word (in its advanced stage) as a myth, precisely because, despite dictionary reconstruction through the etymological method, reenacting the exact chain of individually remembered sensations is highly demanding, especially when they are culturally ingrained. Within the more current semiotic debate, Marzolo’s theory of signs could be further exemplified by the notion of semiotic ideology, the acme of which can be found in the reflections of the American anthropologist Webb Keane. Following the model of Silverstein’s linguistic ideologies, primarily defined as “any sets of beliefs about language articulated by the users as a rationalization or a justification of perceived language structure and use” (Silverstein 1979: 193),^[10] in Keane’s view semiotic ideology can be intended, in a narrow sense, as “the rationalization of semiotic or linguistic forms and practices” (Keane 2018: 66). Moreover, in a more extended view, “by expanding the scope of the concept of language ideology, the expression ‘semiotic ideology’ is meant to draw attention to the dynamic interconnections among different modes of signification at play within a particular historical and social formation” (Keane 2018: 67, my italics; see also Keane 2007: 18).

In fact, Marzolo dedicates the first section of his S. sui segni to the analysis of the entity, mode of action, and effectiveness of using signs (Marzolo 1866: 3–29), that correspond, in the terms of Keane (2018: 64), to “people’s underlying assumptions” about their essence, functions, and consequences. After all, in its original etymological meaning pertaining to sensoriality, ideology is a central term in Marzolo, and as such it is also perceived by Guglielmo Ferrero, particularly in relation to the pathological side, through the mediation of his master Cesare Lombroso (Lauretano 1995: X–XI). According to the Paduan linguist, the mnemonic and recollective function of signs, which underlies the relationship between language and thought, is linked to the individual sensory experience at the outset, which nevertheless becomes social and shared (Lauretano 2003: 38). The ideological plane, in Marzolo’s mind and up to Keane’s more extended sense, consists of the continuous relationship between the subject and the object, which necessarily extends to the cultural level and yet is anchored in a biological origin, identified in the primitive elements of language and its social progress related to a greater associative capacity from perceptions. In accordance with the Lombrosian law of inertia and minimum effort, in Ferrero, symbols are products of an unconscious (and primitive) activity of human beings from external impulses and sensations, also including the need for satisfaction of basic needs; as a result, Ferrero aspires to “costruire una teoria naturalistica del simbolo [build up a naturalistic theory of the symbol]” (Ferrero 1893: 15, transl. mine; see also Lauretano 1993: 140–142).

Within the close relationship between semiotics, medicine, and physiognomy, it seems that in Marzolo, the face stands a step behind – in a nutshell, a handmaid in the service of the word. Despite its secondary role, the Paduan linguist does not give up on conceiving of the face as “a text […] [that] is a proposition of meaning […] at the threshold of nature and culture, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, we and the others” (Leone 2021b: 11–12). Indeed, in Marzolo’s view, the face takes on two roles or senses: (1) as a facial structure, where the sensory organs are located (extensively, the head); and (2) as facial expressions complementary to vocal ones (i.e., mimicry, gestures). Melding sounds and gestures, Marzolo’s semiotic approach to language(s) can therefore be defined as a phono-articulatory and glottogonic (onomatopoeic) physiognomy.